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> In the United States, vehicles with tires carry twice as much freight as vehicles without them. Tires have an outsized role in individual transportation: The

> In the United States, vehicles with tires carry twice as much freight as vehicles without them. Tires have an outsized role in individual transportation: The vast majority of Americans commute on tires, outweighing all other modes by about fourteen to one. Another way to look at this is to see the pitiful state of the rail network on the continent: the most efficient way to move goods and people over land, severely underused. The article's author is very excited about tires, but it would be good to balance the stoke with the health and environmental impacts such mass usage of tires has. Rubber dust and microplastics polution in urban centers and along transport corridors contribute to a range of negative health impacts. Not to mention, where do discarded tires end up: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/01/worlds-biggest-tire-graveyard-in.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/01/worlds-biggest-tire-gr...

paddy_m 3y ago
By Ton-Miles the US leads the world in freight hauled. But for a variety of reasons, railroads are more interested in extracting profits from existing large customers than they are in increasing mode share. A couple of reasons for this, railroads are natural monopolies with industrial facilities needing to be connected to a single rail line. The railroad companies are much more interested in hauling large bulk from single sources that are time insensitive than a heterogeneous mix of freight that needs to be switched and is competitive on timing with trucks. This results in RR policies like precision scheduled rail (PSR), that tries to precisely utilize rail and crews to shuttle long trains across territory. PSR is only oriented to reduce RR costs. If a PSR train is late, every other train is delayed. PSR has also come alongside regularly running trains that are much longer than sidings, which makes it impossible for other trains to pass. Everyone responds to incentives, and there are a couple of regulatory changes that could fix this. 1. Some level of regulation that penalizes RRs for delayed trains. PSR results in lower operating costs but the externality of delays isn't properly paid for by the RRs. 2. Increased technology investment like signalling improvements, positive train control and automatic couplers. 3. Some level of regulation of freight interchange along with timing and price regulations. You can send freight from an RR in Kansas to Louisianna, but you would have to go through two or more controlling RRs that would rather go point to point on their own network. I don't know what this regulation would look like. 4. Land value tax for tracks. Railroads are disincentivized from improving tracks, particularly with electrification. LVT would be hard to pass generally, but it makes a lot of sense to tax railroads less for electric tracks. Electrified tracks allow faster acceleration and electric locomotives are much more reliable than diesel locomotives. The railroads in the US make immense profits (BNSF makes $6B in profits a year). There are severe regulatory capture problems that prevent these advancements. I have read the Switzerland in particular has excellent freight rail that is speedy and used for smaller loads. I don't know their operating techniques that allow this.
chrisco255 3y ago
I bet they're leaving out freight shipped on water.
- tzs 3y ago
  They are not. The modes the bts.gov page they cite breaks it down by are: Truck, Rail, Water, Air (including truck-air), Multiple modes and mail, Pipeline, Others and unknown, and no domestic mode. Tossing the data in a spreadsheet and figuring percentages, the percentages of the total for those modes are: 64.6, 9.8, 4.3, 0.0, 2.8. 17.1, 0.2, and 1.2. So 1.8 ratio of truck to non-truck, which is close enough to their claim that "In the United States, vehicles with tires carry twice as much freight as vehicles without them". Personally, I'd exclude "Pipeline" since I wouldn't count that as a "vehicle". With that excluded the ratio of truck freight to other freight is 3.5 to 1.
  - mckn1ght 3y ago
    I would definitely count pipelines as vehicles, for a few reasons: 1. it removes some need to use other vehicles, the same as any of the other transportation modes, and at quite high volume 2. it may be stationary, but still has “engines” in the form of pumping stations 3. it actually requires auxiliary vehicles for continued operation, in the form of employees traveling up and down the pipeline access roads in trucks or even with helicopters; this would be an interesting part of the calculation 4. there actually are movable parts of pipelines, called “pigs” in the transalaska pipeline: scrubbers that move up and down inside the pipeline, removing the solid material that accumulates on the interior walls They aren’t just a long piece of cylindrical metal sitting there passively.
- ponector 3y ago
  Btw, sea freight between US ports is not a thing due to legacy laws. Thousands ships you can see in the US ports are all for import/export of goods.
  - paddy_m 3y ago
    The Jones act.
tzs 3y ago
> Another way to look at this is to see the pitiful state of the rail network on the continent: the most efficient way to move goods and people over land, severely underused. The US has an inferior passenger rail network. It's freight rail network is fine. In the US, freight within the country is 82% road, 12% rail, 5% water. In the EU it is 77% road, 17% rail, 6% water. I wonder how these are actually counted? Suppose a manufacturer ships a ton of goods from their warehouse in Fresno to a retail chain in New York. Let's say that shipment goes by truck from Fresno to Los Angeles, where it then goes by train to Chicago, and there by water to Albany in New York, and finally from there to a New York warehouse owned the retail chain. Does that count as 1 ton by road, rail, and water? Or is it going to have some kind of weighting by mileage? If it is not weighted than road is going to be several times rail nearly everywhere, because there are a lot of things shipped locally which is almost always going to be cheaper and faster by truck than rail. On top of that most things that go by rail are also going to go part of the way by truck, since most things aren't both produced and consumed close to railroad stations and so it is mostly likely a truck that gets them to and/or from the train.
- hypercube33 3y ago
  Our freight network is running on 1950s diesel electric locomotives so I wouldn't call it fine. Electric has shown it's better just had a huge upfront cost (even though regeneration can probably pay for cost long term even in some setups). Also if it's fine why is most of the cargo moved by diesel semi?
  - Aloha 3y ago
    Electric does have done advantages it also has a fairly massive ongoing reoccurring cost, the electric transmission and delivery systems are expensive and requires expensive skilled labor to maintain. Gasoline and Diesel are miracles, they carry vast sums of energy for little very weight. Rail moves vast sums of cargo on trips over 600 miles, if the cargo is going less than 600 miles, odds are it's on a truck, but for expedited delivery operations, long haul single driver freight loads have mostly vanished, that business goes by train then truck for the last mile.
  - 3y ago
NegativeLatency 3y ago
Found that stat kinda confusing because some trains do have tires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_tire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_tire and most if not all cargo planes land on runways with tires
- Johnny555 3y ago
  It's a lot less confusing when you realize (based on your own link) that freight trains do not typically (if ever) have rubber tires, they are general used for passenger rail systems. And while airplanes do have rubber tires, few people would say that the freight is carried on tires when the tires are only used for a tiny percentage of the trip. If pneumatic tires were never invented, airplanes could still exist, they'd land on non-pneumatic tires, skids, or some other method. I think only someone looking for confusion would be confused by someone saying that rail freight and aircraft do not travel on rubber tires.
deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

paddy_m 3y ago

By Ton-Miles the US leads the world in freight hauled. But for a variety of reasons, railroads are more interested in extracting profits from existing large customers than they are in increasing mode share. A couple of reasons for this, railroads are natural monopolies with industrial facilities needing to be connected to a single rail line. The railroad companies are much more interested in hauling large bulk from single sources that are time insensitive than a heterogeneous mix of freight that needs to be switched and is competitive on timing with trucks. This results in RR policies like precision scheduled rail (PSR), that tries to precisely utilize rail and crews to shuttle long trains across territory. PSR is only oriented to reduce RR costs. If a PSR train is late, every other train is delayed. PSR has also come alongside regularly running trains that are much longer than sidings, which makes it impossible for other trains to pass. Everyone responds to incentives, and there are a couple of regulatory changes that could fix this. 1. Some level of regulation that penalizes RRs for delayed trains. PSR results in lower operating costs but the externality of delays isn't properly paid for by the RRs. 2. Increased technology investment like signalling improvements, positive train control and automatic couplers. 3. Some level of regulation of freight interchange along with timing and price regulations. You can send freight from an RR in Kansas to Louisianna, but you would have to go through two or more controlling RRs that would rather go point to point on their own network. I don't know what this regulation would look like. 4. Land value tax for tracks. Railroads are disincentivized from improving tracks, particularly with electrification. LVT would be hard to pass generally, but it makes a lot of sense to tax railroads less for electric tracks. Electrified tracks allow faster acceleration and electric locomotives are much more reliable than diesel locomotives. The railroads in the US make immense profits (BNSF makes $6B in profits a year). There are severe regulatory capture problems that prevent these advancements. I have read the Switzerland in particular has excellent freight rail that is speedy and used for smaller loads. I don't know their operating techniques that allow this.

chrisco255 3y ago

I bet they're leaving out freight shipped on water.

tzs 3y ago
They are not. The modes the bts.gov page they cite breaks it down by are: Truck, Rail, Water, Air (including truck-air), Multiple modes and mail, Pipeline, Others and unknown, and no domestic mode. Tossing the data in a spreadsheet and figuring percentages, the percentages of the total for those modes are: 64.6, 9.8, 4.3, 0.0, 2.8. 17.1, 0.2, and 1.2. So 1.8 ratio of truck to non-truck, which is close enough to their claim that "In the United States, vehicles with tires carry twice as much freight as vehicles without them". Personally, I'd exclude "Pipeline" since I wouldn't count that as a "vehicle". With that excluded the ratio of truck freight to other freight is 3.5 to 1.
- mckn1ght 3y ago
  I would definitely count pipelines as vehicles, for a few reasons: 1. it removes some need to use other vehicles, the same as any of the other transportation modes, and at quite high volume 2. it may be stationary, but still has “engines” in the form of pumping stations 3. it actually requires auxiliary vehicles for continued operation, in the form of employees traveling up and down the pipeline access roads in trucks or even with helicopters; this would be an interesting part of the calculation 4. there actually are movable parts of pipelines, called “pigs” in the transalaska pipeline: scrubbers that move up and down inside the pipeline, removing the solid material that accumulates on the interior walls They aren’t just a long piece of cylindrical metal sitting there passively.
ponector 3y ago
Btw, sea freight between US ports is not a thing due to legacy laws. Thousands ships you can see in the US ports are all for import/export of goods.
- paddy_m 3y ago
  The Jones act.

tzs 3y ago

> Another way to look at this is to see the pitiful state of the rail network on the continent: the most efficient way to move goods and people over land, severely underused. The US has an inferior passenger rail network. It's freight rail network is fine. In the US, freight within the country is 82% road, 12% rail, 5% water. In the EU it is 77% road, 17% rail, 6% water. I wonder how these are actually counted? Suppose a manufacturer ships a ton of goods from their warehouse in Fresno to a retail chain in New York. Let's say that shipment goes by truck from Fresno to Los Angeles, where it then goes by train to Chicago, and there by water to Albany in New York, and finally from there to a New York warehouse owned the retail chain. Does that count as 1 ton by road, rail, and water? Or is it going to have some kind of weighting by mileage? If it is not weighted than road is going to be several times rail nearly everywhere, because there are a lot of things shipped locally which is almost always going to be cheaper and faster by truck than rail. On top of that most things that go by rail are also going to go part of the way by truck, since most things aren't both produced and consumed close to railroad stations and so it is mostly likely a truck that gets them to and/or from the train.

hypercube33 3y ago
Our freight network is running on 1950s diesel electric locomotives so I wouldn't call it fine. Electric has shown it's better just had a huge upfront cost (even though regeneration can probably pay for cost long term even in some setups). Also if it's fine why is most of the cargo moved by diesel semi?
- Aloha 3y ago
  Electric does have done advantages it also has a fairly massive ongoing reoccurring cost, the electric transmission and delivery systems are expensive and requires expensive skilled labor to maintain. Gasoline and Diesel are miracles, they carry vast sums of energy for little very weight. Rail moves vast sums of cargo on trips over 600 miles, if the cargo is going less than 600 miles, odds are it's on a truck, but for expedited delivery operations, long haul single driver freight loads have mostly vanished, that business goes by train then truck for the last mile.
- 3y ago

NegativeLatency 3y ago

Found that stat kinda confusing because some trains do have tires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_tire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_tire and most if not all cargo planes land on runways with tires

Johnny555 3y ago
It's a lot less confusing when you realize (based on your own link) that freight trains do not typically (if ever) have rubber tires, they are general used for passenger rail systems. And while airplanes do have rubber tires, few people would say that the freight is carried on tires when the tires are only used for a tiny percentage of the trip. If pneumatic tires were never invented, airplanes could still exist, they'd land on non-pneumatic tires, skids, or some other method. I think only someone looking for confusion would be confused by someone saying that rail freight and aircraft do not travel on rubber tires.

deleted 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago
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